Canada with Shakespeare and Shaw

The Play's The Thing At Two Festivals In Ontario

May 28, 2006|By Robert Cross, Tribune staff reporter

STRATFORD, Ont. — On a midsummer's night last year, the Festival Theatre sizzled with a performance of "The Tempest," starring the venerable William Hutt as Prospero. Hutt was appearing in his farewell season at the Stratford Festival of Canada. The veteran of stage, screen and television had reached the age of 85, but his regal bearing and roaring voice still mustered the power of youth. Everyone else in the cast read William Shakespeare's lines with gusto as well and moved about the modern thrust stage with such zeal and in such colorful raiment that the play became part spectacle, a tempest in a kaleidoscope that the Bard may not have imagined but surely would have loved. Hutt, as the deposed duke with magical powers, declaims, near the end, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on." And what followed--after the cheers and curtainless curtain calls--did seem dreamlike.

Hundreds of people, members of the audience, strolled from the theater, past a silvery statue of "The Tempest" playwright and then on along the southern shore of Lake Victoria--really a bulge in a river called Avon.

In darkness lit only by street lamps and the glow from houses near Lakeside Drive, they talked quietly on their way toward home or their hotels or an after-theater drink, the spell of Shakespeare, well performed, lingering on toward midnight.

The Stratford Festival may be a far cry from the realities of theater-going in Elizabethan times, when boys played the female parts and under-bathed spectators gabbled and jeered throughout the performances.

But the modern-day experience seems to be just as thoroughly satisfying, partly because the players keep the enthusiasm level high and boredom at bay, and partly because even the spectating becomes a physical act. One may walk to the theater in a most walkable city; carry a drink to the garden at the interval and start a conversation; clap in the right places and think-think-think. No TiVo to jog the memory. The exercise can be habit-forming.

"People return again and again, every year," said a member of the festival staff.

Throughout the course of a season that stretches from around Shakespeare's generally accepted birthdate of April 23 to the end of October, Stratford is a town where audiences frequently crowd the sidewalks--on their way to a matinee at the Avon Theatre, say, or leaving the Tom Patterson Theatre, heading for the Festival or the intimate Studio.

And that's not the only seasonal dramatic event in sprawling Ontario. About 100 miles east of Stratford, theater lovers gather at Niagara-on-the-Lake for the festival that pays tribute to George Bernard Shaw.

Niagara-on-the-Lake (the lake being Ontario, of course), home of the Shaw Festival, manages to stuff as much charm as Stratford's into a smaller package. Queen Street sets the tone. It's all so very British--from the ornate Prince of Wales Hotel to the Greaves Jams and Marmalades shop.

At the Shaw Cafe and Wine Bar, patrons may dine al fresco near a life-size Shaw statue, or at least pose for a picture with him and wonder what a Favian socialist might have thought about all this.

Two of the three Shaw Festival theaters--Court House Theatre and Royal George--occupy Queen Street buildings with some history on them. The Court House is a national historic site dating from the 1840s. It's where the Shaw Festival began in 1962. The Royal George was once a fixture on the vaudeville circuit. Troops were entertained there during World War I.

The third theater, aptly called the Festival, lies a few blocks farther east in a modern brick compound devoted to the dramatic arts. This is the place for big productions and some astounding sets. Last summer, the West Ham Salvation Army shelter erected for Shaw's "Major Barbara" was a chilling, gray reminder of England's poverty at the end of the 19th Century.

Ontario's two big theater festivals aren't limited to Shakespeare and Shaw, although those productions alone are performed admirably enough to sustain a satisfying schedule.

This Stratford Festival season, which has been in previews but opens officially on Monday, combines Shakespeare's "Coriolanus," "Much Ado About Nothing," "Twelfth Night" and "Henry IV Part 1" with two musicals, Lionel Bart's "Oliver" and Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's "South Pacific," plus Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie," Moliere's "Don Juan," "The Duchess of Malfi" by John Webster, Henrik Ibsen's "Ghosts," "Harlem Duet" by Djanet Sears, "Fanny Kemble" by Peter Hinton, Robert Hewett's "The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead" and "The Liar" by Pierre Corneille.